Safety garments, such as disposable smocks, jumpsuits, gloves, shoe coverings, and hair coverings, are required apparel for the performance of many jobs. Some of the jobs requiring safety garments are performed in clean room environments, wherein the introduction of foreign matter must be minimized. For example, technicians in certain sensitive medical fields dealing with infectious matter, aerospace researchers assembling interplanetary probes, and material scientists developing and manufacturing ultra-pure materials all wear safety garments in clean room environments. The safety garments in some situations perform the dual function of protecting the wearer from the potentially hazardous materials he is working with as well as preventing unwanted matter from the wearer's person from contaminating his work product. In other situations, safety garments protect the worker from exposure to dangerous materials, such as radioactive, chemical, and biological hazards.
Safety garments for use in clean room environments are typically made from nonwoven disposable materials, such as from sheets of spunbond/melt blown/melt blown/spunbond (SMMS) material and the like. Such sheets of material are cut into patterns and stitched together to form desired safety apparel. Typically, as these garments are intended to be disposable and the focus is on their functionality and not aesthetic appeal, little attention is paid to the hemming and stitching. The “as cut” edges are thus exposed. However, in clean room environments where contaminant levels in the parts per million or even parts per billion would be too high, such exposed cut edges present genuine sources of potential particulate contamination.
Moreover, as these garments are intended to be disposable, little effort is made to provide durable stitching. The prevalent attitude is that a garment intended to be worn for just a few hours does not require superior stitching. However, in a clean room situation or a hazardous environment such as asbestos remediation or nuclear demolition and decontamination, seam separation is not only a potential source of particulate evolution in and of itself, but also produces a pathway from the exterior to the interior of the garment through which potentially hazardous material may flow.
Many workplace environments from industrial settings to hospitals hold the potential to expose workers to various types of radiation. One problem faced by workers in such environments is how to safely perform tasks while monitoring their exposure to potentially harmful radiation. Often such protective measures include the use of personal radiation measuring devices referred to as “dosimeters” along with protective garments.
Traditionally, personal dosimeters have been attached to a worker's protective garments using tape or some other improvised means. Under normal working conditions, such informal attachment methods often lead to the detachment and potential loss or damage to the dosimeter device. Additionally, such protective garments are often bulky and difficult to remove safely when they are no longer needed.
In addition, while most protective apparel is used with full-faced respirators to safeguard against respiratory particulate or chemical vapor inhalation in environments where minor skin contamination is not a major health issue, but presents an inconvenience (e.g., spray painting), radiological workers must maintain a contamination-free environment inside the protective “envelope” of their protective clothing and guard against contamination while doffing the protective clothing after the work in a contaminated zone is completed. Hence, they cannot overlook any types of gaps or openings to the suit.
Heretofore the solution to bridging the gap typically formed by the closed zipper and hood underneath the chin and respirator has been to apply layers of duct, vinyl, masking or other tapes over the gap and surrounding the respirator mask to ensure a tight seal. This requires a safety professional to conduct audits of personnel entering contamination areas to ensure adequate application of the tape and correct positioning. It also requires skillful and careful removal of the contaminated tape around the bare neck upon exiting the contaminated work area while the personnel are still wearing potentially contaminated protective gloves, and risks exposing the worker's neck to that cross-contamination, creating a Personal Contamination Event (PCE) that may risk the worker's health and have to be reported to a regulatory agency.
Traditional designs for this level of protective apparel account for a large portion of accidental self-contamination or PCEs each year. Even if a front zipper is closed to the end of its travel path, and the hood is applied over the head and around the face, many of those designs leave a gap in the neck area below the chin. Often, tape is wrapped around the respirator or other face mask to cover that gap. When the person is wearing a respirator, this gap can easily allow contaminants against the skin, which in radiological or biological environments is considered a recordable accident by the Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA). Safe removal of the apparel is often challenging, sometimes requiring a partner or observer and/or a mirror to help the wearer find the end of the tape to begin the sequence of doffing the hood and respirator, running the risk of self-contamination.
There thus remains a need for an improved safety garment that is more durable and less prone to particulate shedding. There is also a need for protective garments to which personal dosimeter devices and other monitoring equipment can be effectively attached, as well as a garment that can be removed quickly, safely, and easily, and withstands high-wear regions such as elbows and knees. There is a further need for garments that protect the wearer from radiological, environmental, and other contaminants, both during exposure and during doffing of the garment. The present disclosure addresses these needs.